In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent files. Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only provide so-called magnet links to its visitors. The first step in this direction was made today with The Pirate Bay replacing the current default torrent download links with magnets. Could this be the end of an era? After half a decade of loyal service, The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker in November 2009. The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time. Now, two years later, that date is coming soon. Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. TorrentFreak was further informed that in “a month or so” the largest torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely.

The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site.

Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future. One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links.

Been using magnet links for years, never really seen a difference in torrents. Only way to move-forward is to abandon old-technology when something new and superior in just about every way comes along.

well magnet links always go back to p2p so if you look at this way p2p links are more harder to pull down than filehosts links n torrents…emule p2p is still going strong and i think people will go back to it

it’ll take another 10+ years for companies and government and other douchebaggery to sift through, rally support against and legally condemn these three other ‘technologies.’ by that time there will be 9 more. (cue lion king -the circle of life-)

The difference is you can’t see the files in the torrent and choose the files you want before you download it. Nor can you rename the torrent before you have completed the download. IT will mean that seed numbers will reduce.

Yes it is ABSOLUTELY true, you can not decide what files to not download when it comes to the magnet link. I do believe that this will result in less seeders. People will grab, rename, erase, and run…..no seeding. This will suck. I love TPB and hate to see it fall short like this…..Oh well, there are other sites but TPB had it all figured out. I like torrents……I wont endorse any other sites here but lets just say they wont be hard to find…..but to look at things from TPB point of view, the government can not block the magnet links….at least i dont assume by reading the above post.

For instance if you’re downloading a season of a television show, and you only one to download 1 or two episodes of that torrent. You won’t be able to with the magnetic link system. You’ll be downloading the entire thing in the dark.

“this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site.” Actually, just two of the several major ISPs had to obey the decision here in Finland. Others, like the one I’m using, don’t really give a flying f**k about such orders.

rapidshare, megaupload, and multiupload are where it’s at for free users, i max out my connection 30mbit, and you can download like 5 gigs/site, wait 20 min and do it again, dont know why people pay of suffer slow torrents anymore

* Are for the wrong torrent (i.e. cut and paste from a slightly earlier completely different NTi search link).
* Don’t even have a search term (!).
* Link to a search page with no results returned (why is it linked then?!).

And don’t talk to me about the outrageous “three fake torrent links” on every NTi page returned. In the end, I end up searching on TPB instead because of the useless NTi links on here…

I already use only magnet links through my Firefox plugin and TPB. Almost all good torrent programs support magnet links. There is no real need to bother with .torrent files anymore. I am surprised this move didn’t come sooner.

If you use uTorrent there is really no difference in the procedure to download things. I went to demonoid and clicked “magnet link” and it started right up downloading just as if I was downloading a torrent. Not really sure what the difference is and why they are making such a big deal about it.